Bryan Singer has been discussing X-Men: Apocalypse in a fascinating new interview in which he divulges several nuggets of info about the planned sequel to X-Men: Days of Future Past.

“I’m co-writing the story and I’m producing it,” says Singer. “I’m negotiating to direct. We’re in the process. We’re trying to figure it out, schedules… My desire would be to direct it.”

As for how the film will fit into the existing X-Men saga, Singer says that it will be set up by Days Of Future Past, which may or may not contain an overt tease for the follow-up…

“I’m still deciding,” says Singer when asked about a potential Apocalypse sting in the forthcoming film. “Something that happens in this movie causes what’s going to happen in that movie.”

“It will also address historical mutantcy,” he continues, “meaning the deep past, mutant origins and things like that. It’s something that’s always intrigued me when we think about our Gods and our history and miracles and powers.”

We can’t wait. In the meantime, there’s Days Of Future Past to savour first, with that film set to open in the UK on 22 May 2014.

In other X-news, actor Evan Jonigkeit confirmed to MTV that he’ll be playing Toad in Days Of Future Past. The character was previously played by Ray Park in the first instalment of the franchise, and suffered the indignity of being on the receiving end of one of the most excruciatingly delivered lines of dialogue in superhero movie history (the one about being struck by lightning).

Source: EW.com

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has released three new posters online, focusing upon our hero’s face-off with principle baddie, Electro.

The three posters are variants on a theme, featuring Jamie Foxx’s villain in all his electricity-wielding glory, and positioning him as Spider-Man’s primary concern in the sequel.

Of course, there are also Rhino and Harry Osborn to be dealt with, although it’s nice to see Electro getting top billing in the promotional material.

Peter Parker’s love life will also presumably get some attention, although none of the promos have given that much focus as yet. Gwen will not be pleased…

Directed by Marc Webb and co-starring Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone and Dane DeHaan, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 will open in the UK on 18 April 2014.

What do you think of the new posters? Tell us, below!

Facebook, the popular social network with over a billion users world wide, has just been hit with a class-action lawsuit. The allegations, revealed in the FT, are that Facebook systematically scans the content of private messages so it can sell the data to third parties such as advertisers.

Facebook’s entire business model is based on the fact that it monitors what users write, like and up-load in order to sell this information on to others. In principle, there is nothing wrong with Facebook using our data to make commercial gains. In the end, the service is free and Facebook has to make money somehow. However, my biggest concern is that the data mining activities are not as transparent as they should be.

Facebook has been criticized for this lack of transparency on many occasions, but two Facebook users now believe Facebook has gone too far. Users Matthew Campbell from Arkansas and Michael Hurley from Oregon have filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the over 166m Facebook users in the US. The accusation is that Facebook is violating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act by scanning and exploiting the content of private messages sent via the Facebook platform without prior consent by users.

The issue here is that ‘private’ messages are seen by most users as exactly that: private! The accusation is that Facebook identifies website links (URLs) contained in private messages and then searches these websites in order to profile users. In their accusation Campbell and Hurley argue: “Representing to users that the content of Facebook messages is ‘private’ creates an especially profitable opportunity for Facebook, because users who believe they are communicating on a service free from surveillance are likely to reveal facts about themselves that they would not reveal had they known the content was being monitored.”

A Facebook spokesperson told Bloomberg that the allegations are without merit and that Facebook will defend itself vigorously. Of course they would say that. The trouble for Facebook is to strike the right balance between offering a customer service in form of a free social networking platform and shareholder returns, especially profits from selling data and advertising.

To answer my own question from the headline: No, I don’t think that this lawsuit will be the end of Facebook. However, I do feel very strongly about the need for better transparency about how our data is used and believe it can lead to a loss of trust that could seriously threaten companies like Facebook. To me, it feels like Facebook (as well as many other companies including Google, Yahoo! etc.) are trying to hide the data mining and analytics activities in their very long Terms and Conditions, to which most people sign up but rarely fully read or understand. Maybe a simple opt out with an alternative “paid for” service would be a good option.

What do you think? What is your view on Facebook exploiting your private data? Would you consider a “paid for” service if your privacy was guaranteed?

Sony announced today Playstation Now, an online network that will allow the streaming of many PS3 and PS2 games on multiple devices, eliminating the problems the company had been having with backwards compatibility on their next-gen console, the PS4.

The network was revealed the crowd by PlayStation chief executive Andrew House while he was on-stage at CES in Las Vegas today. He claimed it will allow for the first time many of the company’s back catalogue such as The Last of Us will be playable on many different devices, including Bravia TVs, tablets and of course the Playstation 4. The service is expected to make use of Gaikai, a cloud gaming service that Sony acquired back in 2012 and will allow users to be able to pause the gaming stream on one device and then resume it on another if they wish. Access to the library will be through a system that allows either the puchase of a single game to stream or a monthly subscription fee that will give access to the entire PS Now library, although a fee is yet to be set in stone. The service will also include things like multiplayer and trophies.

“PS Now will allow users to engage in the world of PlayStation, whether they’re existing fans or have never owned a PlayStation platform.” House said.

The service will launch in the US over the summer with a beta trial in January, but no dates have yet been announced for the system to come to Europe.

AMD has officially launched its latest generation accelerated processing units (APUs) for desktops, codenamed Kaveri, opening up pre-orders for selected customers ahead of general availability.

The first of AMD’s desktop APU designs to include tweaks defined by the Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA) for better interoperability between the CPU and GPU portions, the first to include Graphics Core Next (GCN) technology and promising significant boosts in instructions per cycle (IPC) thanks to the new Steamroller core, it’s fair to say Kaveri is a big deal for AMD.

The flagship of the Kaveri desktop line-up is the A10-7850K, designed to take over from the A10-6800K and compete with Intel’s Core i5-4670K.

The 28nm chip’s 95W thermal design profile (TDP) gives it the headroom required for a base clock of 3.7GHz across all four cores with Turbo Mode reaching 4GHz – both a drop from the last-generation A10-6800K clock speeds, which hit 4.1GHz stock and 4.4GHz Turbo.

Compared to its predecessor, however, the A10-7850K claims a 20 per cent boost in IPC – which should translate to improved performance despite the loss of clock speed.

The GPU portion of the chip, too, has seen a down-clock from 844MHz to 720MHz – but, as with the move to Steamroller on the CPU side, AMD is pointing to the shift to GCN and an increase to 512 shaders as more than making up for that in true performance.

Indeed, figures released by the company show the A10-7850K running the PCMark benchmark some 24 per cent faster than an Intel Core i5-4670K and the 3DMark suite 87 per cent faster, compared to boosts of 15 per cent and 37 per cent for the last-generation A10-6800K.

As before, the chip supports four threads but this time offers improved cache memory: in addition to a boost from two 64KB L1 instruction caches to two 96KB caches, both L1 and L2 caches now benefit from associative sharing – designed to help the CPU and GPU cooperate on tasks, and a major part of the promise of HSA.

The company has confirmed that OEMs are able to pre-order the part now, alongside a lower-end A10-7700K part, with the first products to appear in the coming weeks.

AMD has not, however, provided a date for retail availability.